Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian (together with Sir David Klenerman) have been awarded the 2020 Millenium Technology Prize “their innovation of Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS), technology that enables fast, accurate, low-cost and large-scale genome sequencing”. Sir Shankar is the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and Trinity Fellow.
Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian (together with Sir David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer) were awarded the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
Professor Heonik Kwon (권헌익), Senior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Trinity College
Heonik Kwon has been with Trinity College since 2011 in the capacity of Senior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology. Author of prize-winning books on the historical memories of the Vietnam War, Asia’s Cold War, and the Korean War, he is currently working on the history of cultural internationalism in the twentieth century and beyond.
Professor Kwon is currently engaged in a five year international research project Beyond The Korean War, funded by the Korean Sciences Academy.
V S Ramachandran; MBBS, FRCP (London), PhD( Trinity ) DSc, Distinguished Professor, UCSD ( La Jolla), Adjunct Professor, Salk Institute , La Jolla CA.
V S Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Distinguished Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. V S Ramachandran graduated with a PhD from Cambridge University and Trinity College.
As of July 2019, Ramachandran is also a professor in the UCSD Medical School’s Neurosciences program and an Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Richard recently joined Trinity as Senior Bursar and therefore has responsibility for Trinity’s financial wellbeing. Previously Richard worked many years at BlackRock as Global Chief Investment Strategist, and Head of Global Equity. Richard graduated with a BA in Economics from Cambridge University.
Hermann Hauser in a recent article on Project Syndicate, entitled “The Struggle for Technology Sovereignty in Europe” argues for “the UK and EU to jointly establish a €100 billion ($120 billion) Technology Sovereignty Fund to counter the $100 billion that the US is spending on its technology sovereignty and the even larger amounts China is mobilizing”. I argue here, that we should be thinking that 27+1 countries could create much larger funds in a world where single individuals like Masayoshi Son can create funds of that order.
Hermann Hauser became an entrepreneur right after finishing his PhD in the Cavendish Lab (Cambridge University, UK) around 1978 – on the same lab bench in the Cavendish as myself – and is arguably Europe’s first and most important technology venture investor. Hermann Hauser can be seen as the initiator of Europe’s VC industry. Hermann Hauser is also one of the co-founders of ARM and many other high-tech companies. For a discussion with Hermann see:
The thought of a €100 billion Technology Sovereignty Fund is of course a fantastic plan. As a starting point, thats of course a great idea, however in my opinion, much much more is needed. My thought would be that for European Technology Sovereignty, five or ten, or even more funds of that €100 billion size will be needed. In my opinion, better not only by governments, but by private individuals like European versions of Masayoshi Son.
Three thoughts, which I will illustrate below
a €100 billion fund for 27+1 countries is a lot smaller than the US$ 391 billion the single man Masayoshi Son is estimated to control (Vision funds plus three companies)
a €100 billion fund for 27+1 countries is much smaller than the sovereign funds of very much smaller countries:
Singapore (5.7 million people), sovereign funds: US$ 715 billion
Norway (5.3 million people), sovereign funds: US$ 1327 billion
My third point is that the assets in question (ARM) in Hermann Hauser’s Project Syndicate article would already use a large part of the proposed €100 billion fund.
To put a €100 billion fund for 27 EU Countries + UK into context:
Just one single man (Masayoshi Son, from a Korean immigrant family to Japan) controls at least two funds + and to some extent several companies, worth in total on the order of US$ 391 billion as follows:
the current “fair value” of the first + second Vision Funds is reported as US$ 154 Billion.
In addition, Masayoshi Son also controls (to some extent) the listed companies, which he often uses as acquisition and finance vehicles:
SoftBank Group Corp [TSE: 9984]: market cap = US$ 130 billion
SoftBank Corp [TSE: 9434]: market cap = US$ 67 billion
Z Holdings Corp [TSE:4689]: market cap = US$ 40 billion (includes Yahoo Japan Corp + LINE)
That is just one single man, who created all this from zero, not 27+1 countries.
Or as another comparison, Singapore has built at least two sovereign funds in total estimated to be worth US$ 715 billion. Singapore is one single relatively small country compared to 27+1 European countries (population of Singapore is about 5 million, about the same as Norway, and about the same as the Berlin region)
Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund GIC estimated value US$ 488 billion
Temasec Holdings US$ 227 billion
Norway’s sovereign funds (population about 5 million):
Sovereign Pension Fund – Foreign US$ 1300 billion assets
Sovereign Pension Fund – Norway US$ 27 billion assets
My third point is that a single €100 billion fund is of comparable size of developed assets in question. eg. ARM’s current value would be a substantial part of a potential €100 billion fund. This means that after acquiring two or three companies of the value of ARM this fund would already be exhausted.
As another example, the strategic German mRNA company BioNTech (which among other therapies developed the BioNTech Covid Vaccine in cooperation with Pfizer) has a current market cap of US$ 51 billion. If a situation would arise that such a Sovereign fund would acquire a company such as BioNTech, that would again use up a large fraction – if not almost all of this fund. In my opinion, although of course a €100 billion fund investing in European technology companies in addition to existing substantial VC and investment funds would be great, this is not huge – even relatively small – compared both to the value of many assets in question, and also to the funds some private individuals (eg Masayoshi Son) or 5 million people countries (like Singapore or Norway) manage to build.
So I think many more than a single €100 billion fund would be needed for Technology Sovereignty – I hope circumstances will develop where even more can be invested in European ventures than today. Hermann Hauser’s proposal is certainly a great step in the right direction- many more such steps would be great!
Sir Richard Friend FRS, FREng is maybe best known for his breakthrough discoveries of light emitting polymers, inventions which led to the development of OLED (organic light emitting diodes), and to his founding of several companies
Sir Richard is the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, the Founding Director of the Maxwell Centre at Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge University Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, and has several other important responsibilities, while his main focus is research. Sir Richard has just recently been awarded a very important Research Grant by the European Research Council (ERC): https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/news/three-european-research-council-grants-awarded-cavendish-researchers
From the announcement of the ERC Grant: Professor Sir Richard Friend has been awarded funding for his Spin Control in Radical Semiconductors (SCORS) project, which will explore the electronic properties of organic semiconductors that have an unpaired electron to give net magnetic spin. The project is based on a recent discovery that this unpaired electron can couple strongly to light, allowing very efficient luminescence in LEDs. Friend’s group will explore new combinations of optical excited states with magnetic spin states. This will allow new designs for LEDs and solar cells, and opportunities to control the ground state spin polarisation in spintronic devices.
Lord John Eatwell was Fellow of Trinity College, Lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics and Politics, Professor of Financial Policy at the Cambridge Judge Business School, and President of Queens’ College, Cambridge.
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